The immediate object of the writer was to exhibit the institution of marriage as the cause of what he was pleased to regard as woman's degradation and slavery; and his heroine is a young lady of highly respectable parentage, who proposes to regenerate womanhood by living with, and having children by, a man, without submitting to the humiliation of any legal bond. She accomplishes her purpose, and has a daughter, whose position, under our false civilisation, becomes so disagreeable in consequence of her illegitimate birth, that the mother at last commits suicide, in order to deliver her from the presence of such an embarrassing parent. In the author's view she is a martyr, and a model for immediate imitation. Ludicrous, however, as the book is in its main scheme and in its object, the author shows great acuteness in a number of his incidental observations. He is, for example, constantly insisting on the fact that the institution of private property, which socialism aims at revolutionising, is merely one embodiment of a general principle of individualism of which marriage and the family are another, and that the two stand and fall together. But an admission yet more important than this is as follows: So that nothing may be wanting to the bitterness of the heroine's sublime martyrdom, the author represents her daughter--and he does this with considerable skill--as developing from her earliest childhood all those tastes and prejudices (an instinctive sympathy with those ordinary motives and standards) against which the mother's whole life, and her education of her daughter, had been at war. "Herminia," says Mr. Allen, "had done her best" to indoctrinate the child with the pure milk of the emancipating social gospel; "but the child herself seemed to hark back, of internal congruity, to the lower and vulgarer moral plane of her remoter ancestry. There is," he proceeds, "no more silly and persistent error than the belief of parents that they can influence to any appreciable degree the moral ideas and impulses of their children. These things have their springs in the bases of character; they are the flower of individuality; and they cannot be altered after birth by the foolishness of preaching." Let us read this passage, with the alteration of only a word or two, and it forms an admirable criticism of the more recent speculations of the party to which Mr. Allen belonged. There is no more silly and persistent error on the part of socialists than the belief that they can influence to any appreciable degree the moral ideas and impulses of the citizens of any community, or that these things, which are the flower of congenital individuality, can be altered after birth by the foolishness of socialism.